Hermione's War
by Cemelina
Summary: 18 year old Hermione is no longer sleeping well. With a war raging on around her, and strange nightmares to plauge her mind, she is left to find solace where it is least expected. Can she forgive someone who changed her life? Can she help him to help her?
1. Chapter 1

**Welcome. Cemelina bids that you enjoy her story as much as possible, and that you review with constructive criticism, if at all possible. Cemelina wishes all to know that she takes due notice of the fact that Harry Potter and all other characters used in this FanFiction belong to J.K. Rowling, not Cemelina. If Cemelina were writing something based on her own fictional universe, she would refer to it simply as "Fiction" without the "Fan." Well-wishes, and thank you for your time. **

_Thump._

Hermione Granger opened her eyes to a mat of brown curls, which she soon identified as her hair. Recognizing the cause of her throbbing side and soon-to-be bruised leg, however, took a bit more consideration.

She had been in the middle of such a pleasant dream. A sort of initiation back into her sleeping cycle, after a week of pure, waking misery. In it, Hermione had been dancing with her best friends, spinning in circles with Ron Weasley and Harry Potter across an otherwise deserted ballroom floor. Faster and faster they circled, until she and Harry were in gales of laughter at the way that Ron's ginger hair spun out around his reddening face. On they went, until Hermione could feel herself getting dizzy. She realized, as she began to collapse, that she'd be taking her friends to the ground with her. This only increased the strength of her laughter. And so it was with a smile on her face that Hermione was brought violently into conscienceness.

It took a moment for Hermione to understand that it was on her dormitory carpet that she lay in pain, not a hard dance floor. Yet the pain itself was very much real, and she was not happy to be awake again. The dream had been so clear, almost lucid. Even so, the details had already begun to drift from her memory. Hermione clung to them desperately, for this was the first happy event in her life to occur for nearly 6 days, not bearing that it was only in her imagination.

Adding to Hermione's confusion and frustration was an actual mass of ginger hair that flew past her face the moment that her eyes opened. In the castle's war-time state of disarry, having any unknown bearer of hair in your dormitory at 3 in the morning was not a comforting prospect. Hermione reached immediately for her wand on her bedside table, but this time the identification process was faster.

_Crookshanks. _

Hermione stood up groggily, massaging her injured side as she moved. She lit the tip of her wand and watched as her cat exited the room with a speedy four-legged grace, headed to wherever cats go in their nighttime solitude. Coming from her mixture of pain and shock, from falling and then finding a prowling Crookshanks, respectively, Hermione knew that sleep was now beyond reach for this night. The truly frustrating aspect of this knowledge was that only a month ago, Hermione could have crawled back into bed and been asleep again within a matter of minutes. By her estimation, however, it had been since the beginning of October that she had enjoyed a good night's rest.

At first, it had only been nightmares. Hermione would find herself waking almost every morning to dreams in which she was captured by Death Eaters. Dreams in which she'd recieve the news that a mass muggle-killing had resulted in the loss of her parents. Dreams in which her friends were murdered in front of her very eyes, before she'd wake up, sweating and screaming, wishing only that her nightmares could go back to getting expelled from school or failing Transfiguration.

Of course, nightmares of this sort were only natural with the war going on around her. Hermione was not the only student suffering from them, as far as she could deduce from the perpetual dark circles around the eyes of poor Neville Longbottom, or the stringy, unkempt look that Hannah Abbot was starting to take on. The real problem had begun when nightmares turned to daydreams, and what was supposed to be only her mind's imagination had begun to be reflected in her daily life.

Soon, every dark corner held a Death Eater. Every unexpected noise was cause to send stunning spells around the room. Every person Hermione had thought she knew was a potential enemy. What really frightened her about this was that she had always been such a brave and rational individual. All of Hogwarts knew Hermione Granger as the intelligent, rule-abiding, all-together Golden Girl of Gryffindor. How could such an individual be jumping at every small suprise?

Slowly, these thoughts consumed her mind. During the day, she noticed things that others did not see, things that frightened her. At night, she did not sleep, pondering these things.

Distracted though they were, Ron and Harry did not fail to notice the change wrought in Hermione as she lost her ability to get a decent night's sleep. It had been only a week ago that Ron had ended the short relationship that he had shared with Hermione after the last summer, at Fleur Delacour's wedding to Ron's brother Bill. That had been the last truely peaceful day the three friends had shared together. Ron was ignoring the war, pretending it was okay, and finding a strange solace in Luna Lovegood. Harry was preoccupied, refusing to talk to anyone or respond to a kind offer of help. Hermione was living her life in a sleepless trance. Nothing was the same, and for a week, Hermione knew what it was to be in hell.


	2. Chapter 2

Thunder crackled through the night, as the storm which had been happening around Hogwarts for days now raged on. As a bolt of lightning flashed by the dormitory window, Hermione was surprised to find that even the rain-fearing Lavender Brown did not wake from her slumber. No, Hermione thought she could safely assume that she was the only person awake in the castle on that stormy Tuesday night. There were very few witches or wizards left who were excited at the prospect of facing the waking world anymore. After all, no one ever dies in their own dreams.

Hermione stared out the window for a moment, and for only a moment, she heard the storm outside ease. A peircing silence ran through the Gryffindor Tower for those few seconds. Though peaceful, Hermione found it unnerving. In the back of her mind, she thought she could hear shackles rattling. That had been a favorite detour for her sleeping imagination, during the worst of her nightmares. Suddenly, Hermione felt compulsed to leave her dorm, as soon as possible. A strange combination of fright and curiosity over the noise she thought she had heard compelled her like nothing she had felt before.

Three hours remained before students would be allowed to leave their Common Rooms for breakfast in the Great Hall. Hermione knew that Headmaster McGonagall would be very unhappy if her Head Girl were discovered out of bed at 3 in the morning, but that insatiable longing for knowledge that had gotten Hermione her position as Head Girl in the first place also drove her to make the descision not to waste her alone time. Casting a quick and skillful Disallusionment Charm over herself, the young witch made her way down the girls' staircase and through the portrait hole.

She was walking, as could be guessed, to the Library. After trips through many corriders and secret-passages, however, something managed to distract her from her path. The tip of Hermione's wand barely illuminated a silvery object to the right of a staircase. Picking it up on a sleep-deprived impulse, she found it to be her own cat's nametag. On the little circle the name "Crookshanks" was neatly inscribed. But why, Hermione wondered, had Crookshanks lost his nametag after seven years of its being safely around his neck? And how, for that matter, had he gotten out of the Gryffindor Common Room without human assistance?

A little further down the staircase, Hermione discovered the red collar that her bandy-legged cat usually wore, cast away but looking tattered, as if the cat had gone to great lengths to somehow claw it off his neck. It was only as she tore her eyes from the strangely mangled collar that Hermione noticed that she had found herself in the school dungeons, where she had once gone for potions classes with Professor Snape.

Immediately heightening her sense of hearing, as the dark dungeon was illuminated by neither moonlight nor torches, Hermione began to notice small sounds that were not appropriate for this sort of setting. The low hooting of an owl, or the ticking sound of tiny claws across the floor. Driven again by curiosity, along with the disregard for rules and common sense that her years with Harry and Ron had wrought in her, Hermione followed the almost inpercievable noises through another series of corridors, until she was brought at last to a steel door. At the bottom of the door, a huge range of animals, including the now-unidentified Crookshanks, pawed and clawed and hissed at the closed door, attempting in vain to make it open. For a witch, however, the task was much easier.

_Alohomora. _

Hermione did not even need to say the spell aloud, and the door unlocked. Opening it very slightly, a horrible smell of decay hit her. The animals entered without hesitation, but Hermione stopped, creating a small, harmless fire in the palm of her hand to bring a dim light to the blackness. She thought she could hear someone taking in difficult, rasping breaths from the already thick dungeon air. She slowly moved forward.

There, lying on the ground, Hermione spotted something in the shape of a body. For a moment, the thought entered her mind that this was certainly too pale to be a human body--too deathly white to be living flesh. Her mind made the connection quickly enough, though, that this was the source of the difficult breathing. She could see the figure heaving for oxygen. And it was no suprise, for this person appeared undernourished to the highest degree at which one can maintain life. Bones jutted out from each limb, and on closer inspection, the light revealed large stab-like wounds in what remained of the flesh. Dried blood covered the cement floor around it, forcing Hermione to struggle to maintain her already-fragile composure.

The figure coiled itself tighter as she approached. Now, Hermione saw only a mass of blackness, with no hint of humanity left. She moved cautiously, her wand extended, hoping that she wasn't too late to help this man--if there was, indeed, a man somewhere in that sickly body and raggedy pile of clothing.

Just as she knelt down to touch him, a wave of dizziness hit her, and for the second time that night Hermione crashed to the floor. Her last thought, as she passed out, was that it felt as if she had just been spinning in circles with Ron and Harry...She thought she could see Ron's red hair flash past her eyes again...With that, for the first time in a week, Hermione Granger fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

**Now, Cemelina bids you again to review, review, review!**


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